Book Details

ISBN 139781847196569

Paperback296 pages

Book Description

Using WordPress you can easily create dynamic blogs and web sites with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and although it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plug-ins with ease. Its versatility and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users. While it is easy to get started with WordPress, its full power is not obvious.

If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured blog or non-blog web site in no time, this book is for you. It will give you a rapid and straightforward introduction to the rich and powerful features of WordPress and get you up and running with a state-of-the-art blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. It will help you learn everything WordPress has to offer, from the ground up, so you can build your complete web site. You will see many of WorPress's hidden powers that will help you build a fully functioning web site.

You will be introduced to the main aspects of a blog – users, communities, posts, comments, news feeds – and learn how to manage them using WordPress. You will learn to install WordPress and customize the look-and-feel of your web site. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content, be it text or images, on your blog, and also understand how users interact with the blog. By working through the book you'll be inspired as well as informed, and have the capability and the ideas to make your blog cutting edge and exciting to maximize its impact.

More advanced users will also pick up tips on creating your own themes and plug-ins, and such technical steps as backing up your WordPress web site and moving it from one server to another.

What You Will Learn

Add tags and images to your posts and manage the comments on those posts

Personalize and control the content of your web site using feature-rich widgets and plug-ins

Manage the look and feel of your WordPress web site with customized themes and templates

Share a blog with multiple authors and give them differing levels of control over blog administration and content

Manage different levels of privileges for your users in a particular community and create custom roles for them

Link your web site to the outside world through feeds, syndication, and podcasting

Explore how you can take WordPress beyond blogging and use it as an effective CMS tool

Here is brief summary of what each chapter covers:

Chapter 1 – Introduction to WordPress This chapter covers all about blogging, including what a blog is, the common terms using in blogging, and what they mean, what WordPress has to offer to a blogger, and why to choose it.

Chapter 2 – Getting Started This chapter covers choosing where to build your WordPress web site, upgrading from an older version of WordPress and getting familiar with the Administration Panel.

Chapter 3 – Blogging Your Heart Out This chapter covers full process of creating new posts for your blog, including applying categories and tags to your post, using the rich text editor, controlling the timestamp, and also more advanced options, including excerpt and trackbacks. It also covers controlling commenting and discussion on your blog, as well as keeping out comment spam.

Chapter 4 – Pages, Images, Plug-ins, and more... Blog posts aren't the only content in your blog. You also can control pages of static information, upload and manage images on your site, keep a list of bookmarked links and add plug-ins.

Chapter 5 – Finding and Installing Themes Learn where to find existing themes online in a variety of reliable places, how to choose which theme is right for your web site or blog, and the process of installing and using your new theme. This chapter also covers enabling and using widgets in your theme.

Chapter 6 – Developing your own theme From soup to nuts, this chapter covers the process of creating your own theme, including setting up your design to accommodate your blogging goals, converting your initial build into an authentic WordPress theme, creating templates within your theme to serve different purposes for your blog, making your theme widget-friendly, and sharing your theme with the WordPress community.

Chapter 7 – Feeds and Podcasting This chapter explains what feeds are and how to add them to your WordPress web site, tracking subscribers to your blog, and aggregating feeds from other sources on your blog. This chapter also covers using your WordPress web site to create a podcast (it's easy!).

Chapter 8 – Developing Widgets and Plug-ins For the more advanced user, this chapter will show you how to create plug-ins and widgets that will work with any installation of WordPress. There are step-by-step instructions so you don't get lost along the way.

Chapter 9 – Community Blogging This chapter covers managing and handling a mutli-user blog, including a detailed outline of the roles and capabilities included in WordPress.

Chapter 10 – WordPress as a CMS This chapter covers, from start to finish, using WordPress to create a non-blog web site. It includes discussion of designing your theme, getting set up, creating custom pages that display post content in non-blog ways, customizing the homepage to contain dynamic content, and creating a news page.

Chapter 11 – Administrator's Reference This chapter covers all of the basic things a WordPress administrator needs to know, from system requirements, to a detailed step-by-step discussion of installing WordPress, moving your WordPress web site from one place to another, backing up, common template tags, and basic troubleshooting.

Authors

April Hodge Silver

April has been designing and developing new web sites from scratch since 1999, just before her graduation from Columbia University. Early in her career, she worked for several web companies and startups, including DoubleClick and About.com. Since 2004, she has been self-employed through her company Springthistle Design and has worked with a staggering variety of companies, non-profits, and individuals to realize their web site dreams. In her professional work, April's focus is always on usability, efficiency, flexibility, clean design, and client happiness. WordPress is the best solution for many of Springthistle's Clients, though April also develops custom web applications using PHP and MySQL. More about April's professional work at http://springthistle.com

In her free time, April enjoys developing recipes in the kitchen, bicycling, and relaxing with her daughter, dog, and darlin wife.

Hasin Hayder

Hasin Hayder graduated in Civil Engineering from the Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (RUET) in Bangladesh. He is a Zend-certified Engineer and expert in developing localized applications. He is currently working as a Technical Director in Trippert Labs and managing the local branch in Bangladesh. Beside his full time job, Hasin writes his blog at https://hasin.wordpress.com, writes article in different websites and maintains his open source framework, Orchid. Hasin lives in Bangladesh with his wife Ayesha and his son, Afif.

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Series & Level

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Learning

As a new user, these step-by-step tutorial guides will give you all the practical skills necessary to become competent and efficient.

Beginner's Guide

Friendly, informal tutorials that provide a practical introduction using examples, activities, and challenges.

Essentials

Fast paced, concentrated introductions showing the quickest way to put the tool to work in the real world.

Cookbook

A collection of practical self-contained recipes that all users of the technology will find useful for building more powerful and reliable systems.

Blueprints

Guides you through the most common types of project you'll encounter, giving you end-to-end guidance on how to build your specific solution quickly and reliably.

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Take your skills to the next level with advanced tutorials that will give you confidence to master the tool's most powerful features.

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Progressing

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